Clint,
I'm a long time fan of Audioholics and after reading your article on the Datacolor Spyder TV, a question came to mind. In the article you stated:
Conclusion
For the price of a TV stand (or a short esoteric component video cable) you can make your TV really shine. To spend thousands of dollars on a high definition television set and then live with the default factory settings should be a crime. The difference between a well-calibrated television and an oversaturated, blue-tinged torch is simply amazing for those who have never seen it. While a professional calibrator can do even more for you due to a wealth of additional controls available in the service menus, many will be satisfied to know that they can buy a single product that can be used to perform basic user calibrations on all the television sets in a home and be kept handy for whenever a new product such as a DVD player is added into the system. Now, if only the SpyderTV owners would rise up and take their colorimeters into the local consumer electronics chain store...
Your second sentence really struck me. In my humble opinion, the real crime here is that we, as consumers, spend thousands of dollars on a TV and it is not even close to being calibrated correctly!
Currently, the Sound and Vision calibration DVD is $20, the Digital Video Essentials calibration DVD is $25, and the AVIA calibration DVD is $50. Back in December 2002, when I bought my 32" Toshiba CRT HDTV for about $1300.00, I bought the S&V DVD, so I spent ~ 1.5% of the purchase price to calibrate the TV. Your article states that spending 13.5% of the purchase price of the average HDTV ($2k) is acceptable. What does $270.00 on Datacolor's Spyder DVD get me that the other DVDs won't?
regards,
Andrew Johnson
